We give a detailed description of the May 16, 1931, lecture by Albert Einstein on cosmology at Oxford University. In this lecture, Einstein discussed his cosmological model of 1931, a model in which the universe was assumed to expand from zero size to a maximum size and then collapse back again. We use information from the two blackboards that Einstein filled for the lecture and intertwine it with a detailed newspaper transcript of what Einstein said concurrently in German. We thereby present a line-by-line explanation of what was conveyed on the blackboards visually and, in an approximate way, what was concurrently conveyed verbally by Einstein. Even though very few in the audience that day would qualify, we assume the point of view of a sufficiently prepared member of the audience. Our discussion is informed by a summary pamphlet that was handed out by the organizers of the talks. We also describe some mistakes that Einstein made in his talk, issues surrounding the successful preservation of one of the two blackboards, as well as some aspects of Einstein's cosmological thinking after the talk.

The author discusses the suggestion that holographic space is in some way different from the space generated by other more traditional media and then examines the problems that this difference imposes on criticism of the results. He uses the way we visually interpret images presented on a flat surface through physiological and psychological depth cues to introduce the paradox of a flat holographic surface displaying a three-dimensional image. In presenting a diagrammatic explanation for the space displayed by holograms, he focusses on the technical developments of the holographic process, the viewing zones generated by holographic plates and the restrictions imposed during the recording process.

In the binary economy of art and science, art’s subjectivity is widely perceived as undermining its contribution to knowledge. Even when invoked by those with a vested interest in art, the potential ascribed to art within this economy does not do justice to the range and critical power of art. Transgressing this art-science binary, the author explores how objectivity is practiced within art and argues that the relationship between art and science is not a matter of boundaries but of intertwined inflections of understanding.

One common criticism of algorithmic art is its slavish devotion to technical virtuosity at the expense of artistic intent and content. To address this problem, the author uses an algorithmic method known as “evolving expressions,” which both challenges the technical ability of the artist and also paves the way to “art by choice”—an art that re-creates what lies in the imagination by visualizing the creatures that live there, the creatures of our dreams.

One common criticism of algorithmic art is its slavish devotion to technical virtuosity at the expense of artistic intent and content. To address this problem, the author uses an algorithmic method known as “evolving expressions,” which both challenges the technical ability of the artist and also paves the way to “art by choice”—an art that re-creates what lies in the imagination by visualizing the creatures that live there, the creatures of our dreams.

The stage is set to study Einstein’s 1920 document. He began by mentioning the summary paper on relativity he wrote for Stark’s journal:

Hubble’s announcement in 1925 of nebulae external to our Milky Way was momentous. Those few puzzling blurs in the night sky were mostly ignored over the millennia of astronomical history, as the focus instead was on the Sun and Moon, planets and stars. The nebulae, it turned out, were ultimately the essential structures in the universe. The historical process, not unexpectedly, went slowly. There was a reluctance to accept the nebulae as being external to our galaxy home; once accepted as being external, there was still a residual homocentric hesitation to conceive of them as being very far and very large, especially larger than our own Milky Way. The aversion to abandoning once again our centrality and uniqueness can be gauged by the evolution of terminology: the external nebulae were sometimes called nongalactic nebulae, cosmic nebulae, extra-galactic nebulae, and, of course, island universes. The term galaxy was too synonymous with our Milky Way to give up easily. Hubble, when he died in 1953, still called them nebulae. The issue, I think, was similar to the difficultly in post-Copernican times of calling our Earth a planet.

The 1920s, in introducing Einstein to the experience of being a celebrity, culminated at the end of the decade with his second trip to the United States instigated by, of all people, Robert Millikan, who was skeptical of Einstein’s particle model of light, even after he himself experimentally confirmed its predicted equation. Furthermore, after the eclipse experiment, Millikan put forward an alternative “plausible” explanation that he hoped would be true: that the bending of light was caused by refraction from solar gases that deflected the light rays. Nonetheless, he respected Einstein, and realized that he was a major physicist of the century.

“The theory does not yet contain the conclusions of the quantum theory. It furnishes, however, clues to a natural development, from which we may anticipate further results in this direction.” This statement from the 1931 report by Einstein on the unified field theory was quoted before at the end of Chap. 26, and I called it a curious sentence. It is curious because the quest for a unified field theory, as described it so far, was an attempt to unite gravity and electromagnetism. Where, or how, did quantum theory enter the topic, especially since we have seen Einstein being involved in a quarrel over the hegemony of Bohr’s phenomenalist interpretation?

In seeking a unity of forces in nature Einstein was drawing on a tradition going back at least into the previous century. As seen in Chap. 4, nineteenth century physics was awash in ideas of conservation, transformation, and unification – all three coupled into a conceptual whole. Regarding the specific forces in Einstein’s quest, the framework goes back to Newton’s trilogy of space, force, and matter. Kant’s subsequent unification was based on his reduction of matter to force, reducing the trilogy to a duality of force and space. Kant’s concept of force then morphed into energy, and Einstein’s E = mc 2 changed the duality to mass-energy and space. When gravity became warped space (really space-time), gravity was accounted for. A beautiful unification.

As seen previously (Chap. 9), the time dilation was probably the most difficult concept from special relativity for readers to conceptualize and accept as real. Einstein, we also saw, presented his interpretation of the time dilation in a lecture in Zürich in January 1911. Furthermore, the idea of the twin paradox arose later that year from a lecture by Paul Langevin, and there was considerable discussion on this problem shortly thereafter. The highly regarded French philosopher Henri Bergson was present at Langevin’s lecture. This exposed Bergson to the world of relativity and the time dilation.

In March of 1933, when Albert and Elsa left Caltech after their third sojourn abroad, they crossed the Atlantic and settled temporarily in Belgium, where he had a friendship with the King and Queen. The Einsteins lived in a small seaside town on the North Sea about 70 miles from Brussels, and were protected by security guards because the Nazis had put a price on his head. The Nazis emptied his bank account and ransacked his Berlin apartment several times, looting rugs, paintings, books, and other sundry items. Fortunately a large collection of Einstein's scientific and personal papers were saved, taken to the French embassy, and smuggled out of the country by diplomatic pouch. How this happened, and which of Elsa's daughters was responsible for this act – Margot and her husband, Dimitri Marianoff, or Ilse and her husband, Rudolf Kayser – is dependent on what source you read. The Nazi's also raided Einstein's summer cottage looking for weapons; they confiscated a breadknife.

The title of this first relativity paper, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” revealed that the topic grew out of issues pertaining to electromagnetism, which as seen in the last Chapter was a major field of nineteenth century physics. The first sentence of the paper set-up the conceptual framework: “It is well known that Maxwell’s electrodynamics – as usually understood at present – when applied to moving bodies, leads to asymmetries that do not seem to be inherent in the phenomena.” What were these supposedly well-known asymmetries, and what were the phenomena he was speaking of? The next series of sentences gave the answers. Einstein went back to Faraday’s experiment of a magnet moving through a conductor (or a loop of wire). With the conductor at rest, the moving magnet generated an electric field and this produced a current in the wire (Fig. 4.4). If, on the other hand, the magnet were set at rest and the conductor moved over the magnet, even though (according to theory) there was no electric field around a stationery magnet, a current of the same strength as the former case was still produced in the wire (Fig. 5.1). Einstein saw this as an asymmetry in interpretation in the two cases; one with, and one without, an electric field. Despite this apparent conceptual problem, the “observable phenomenon here depends only on the relative motion of conductor and magnet…,” since in both cases electricity was produced in the wire. Undoubtedly, the asymmetry was not inherent in the phenomenon, as he said. From the viewpoint of the phenomenon, a current was produced by any relative motion between the magnet and the conductor, whereas the theory of electromagnetism affirmed that an electric field was produced only by a moving magnet, not one at rest.

The ancient Greeks introduced an important philosophical or methodological concept into astronomy based on our limitations to direct access to the world of the heavens. It was part of what philosophers call epistemology, a word introduced in Chap. 17, and which we will use in the rest of this chapter; the term refers to the process of acquiring knowledge of the world. Obviously, we can touch and handle rocks; we can smell the roses; we can even, with the wave of a hand, feel seemingly invisible air. But we have only visual access to the Moon, Sun, stars and everything above. How therefore can we really know anything about them, beyond hypothesizing? We can devise models and even test the models, but sometimes the same result comes from two different models. Without direct contact to the world above we can only deal with phenomena (what we see) not reality. Thus arose the epistemological distinction between realism (our direct knowledge of the earthly world), and what will call phenomenalism, for the appearances (phenomena) alone of the world of the heavens. Although originally directed to our knowledge of the heavens, it easily was transferred to the larger epistemological question: How do we know anything?

Sometime during Einstein’s student years, his friend Besso introduced him to the widely-read book The Science of Mechanics, by Mach. In perhaps the most famous section of the book, Mach put forward a critique of Newton’s concept of absolute motion and the corresponding idea of absolute space. Einstein was enamored by this argument and pondered it for many years. The argument from Newton, however, first must be understood before considering Mach’s challenge. So we return to Newton and yet another famous thought experiment – this one is called Newton’s bucket experiment.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsAlexander Marr. Between Raphael and Galileo: Mutio Oddi and the Mathematical Culture of Late Renaissance Italy. 376 pp., illus., tables. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2011. $45 (cloth).David R. TopperDavid R. Topper Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 103, Number 1March 2012 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/666409 Views: 15Total views on this site © 2012 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.